Banjo Kazooie spiritual successor Project Ukulele heading to Kickstarter
Playtonic Games, which is made up of ex-Rare employees, has announced a Kickstarter for its spiritual successor to the Banjo Kazooie series.
The news of the Kickstarter was shared with Eurogamer prior to the announcement at EGX Rezzed today, along with the first in-engine shots of the title.
"We honestly weren't expecting as big a reaction as we got [after the announcement]," Gavin Price said. "We've had tons and tons of emails - a massive fan response. But it's good - we want that pressure, we're really happy with that reception.
"Up until a few weeks ago [Kickstarter] wasn't really on our radar, but since we've had such a massive response from people - we're thinking that the game has to become a lot bigger, a lot broader, we want to do a lot more with it now to make people happy."
Codenamed Project Ukulele for the time being, Price said the team is still tossing title ideas around for the 3D platformer which he says will be "between the size of Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie."
Like the titles it was inspired by, Project Ukulele stars animals in an adventure which will be "less linear" than the Banjo titles.
Price said the game could easily be developed with "a few hundred thousand pounds," but the team wants to scale it based on features fans want to see included.
"We could do the game comfortably on £400,000, but if we had more to spend we could, for example, hire a proper QA team rather than beta testing it," he said. "We don't want to force tiers and stretch goals on fans, we'd love to hear if people would like to voice characters, if people want to have early access to the game, perhaps - and this is just a pipe dream - if we can have a boxed N64 copy of the game to really play off the game's nostalgic feel.
"So it's about finding out what people want from us from the Kickstarter campaign and then creating it with that in mind."
Price said the studio is developing the title on Unity and while platforms are unconfirmed at the moment, it doesn't relish the idea of leaving any particular platform out of the equation because Playtonic doesn't want to "leave anyone out."
We'll find out more on the game once the Kickstarter launches next month.
